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Monday, November 26, 2007

Status=Sleepy

I'm sleepy today because last after work and after dinner I did a stupid thing. Instead of working on any one of my still pending projects for grad school, I picked up young adult horror novel.

Darren Shan's Lord Loss, book one in his still ongoing Demonata series. I'm not going to do a full on review because, frankly, it's a bestseller and doesn't really need the publicity. But the damn thing grabbed me and wouldn't let go. It was a lot of fun, and I blasted through the 250 pages in about three hours.

When I was in sixth grade---probably about the right age for this novel---I had a fire in my bedroom right before Christmas. No one was hurt, but I spent the next several months sleeping on the sofa in the basement while my bedroom was repaired. I had just gotten into the wonderfully creepy books of John Bellairs. Reading them freaked me out. Reading things like The House with the Clock in it's Walls at night, I kept hearing noises and seeing shadows that weren't there, but I kept reading anyway. I had to know what happened. It's why I read so much as a kid and, at least partly, why I keep reading now.

After English classes and a writing program it's easy to forget that novels aren't always about deep character development, powerful themes and poetic prose. Sometimes they're just meant to be enjoyed, and critics and reviewers---myself included---forget that sometimes. I think that's part of why I like comics so much. They tend to pull me into the story in a more immediate way than most novels can do.

Anyway, reviews and other madness coming as the demon lord of grad school papers permits.

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"It's strange," Hebdomeros was thinking, "as for me, the very idea that something had escaped my understanding would keep me awake at nights, whereas people in general are not in the least perturbed when they see or read or hear things they find completely obscure".